This week, the front-runner in the race to become the Republican presidential nominee called for a ban on roughly 1 billion people from entering or remaining in the United States. His unconstitutional policy proposal calls for blocking all Muslims from the country, ostensibly including Muslim soldiers and airmen who are currently fighting abroad for Donald Trump’s freedom to say that they shouldn’t get to come home. It’s a move straight out of the Fascist Dictator Adult Coloring Book, and, even more concerning, his support has only gone up because of it.

It’s a great time for easy hatred and fearful bluster, which makes it a perfect time to revisit Tom McCarthy’s 2007 film, The Visitor, about a New Yorker who befriends three illegal immigrants a week before one is set for deportation. With McCarthy’s Spotlight now in theaters and shining a glowing light on the fast-disappearing newspaper business, The Visitor offers a glimpse of a cross-cultural understanding we can hope won’t vanish as quickly.

The story kicks off in earnest when dispassionate professor Walter (Richard Jenkins) returns to his New York City apartment after time away only to find a young African woman taking a bath in his tub. There’s a confrontation, and Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) holds Walter against the wall as Zainab (Danai Gurira) wraps herself in a towel and shouts in French. The image of a strong, young Muslim man threatening a fragile, old white guy is potent, but the rest of The Visitor turns that potentially inflammatory image on its head.

When Walter shows them his keys, the accidental squatters realize they’ve been tricked by a guy named Ivan who rented them a place that wasn’t his. Tarek and Zainab thought they were being attacked by an intruder. It’s a misunderstanding, and, recognizing that Tarek and Zainab are also victims of the situation with nowhere else to go, Walter offers them the same bed they’ve been sleeping in for months. McCarthy takes the sequence to move from fearful stereotype to compassion, crafting a condensed lesson against fight-or-flight instinct.

The odd trio get to know each other; Tarek’s warmth and musicality coax Walter out of his funk, while Zainab’s stern realism anchors the alien nature of what they’re all doing. Tarek, from Syria, plays the djembe. Zainab, from Senegal, makes and sells her own jewelry. They flirt and fight and look like any young couple stuck in the salad days, and in their company, Walter catches a glimpse of life he hasn’t seen since his wife died. He’s been guilty of going through the motions, and it takes strangers from the other side of the planet to help him find meaning again.

Then things fall apart. Tarek is arrested in the subway and sent to an immigration-detention center where low-level, check-list bureaucrats know nothing and offer no help. Walter hires a lawyer, meets Tarek’s mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), and confronts the towering frustration of an uncaring, systemic wall that’s nearly impossible to climb over. His father was jailed in Syria for criticizing the government, so it’s dangerous for Tarek to return, but the United States has denied his asylum status without explaining why. A week before, he was joyfully slapping a drum onstage at a packed bar, and now the underlying reality of the limbo he lives in comes sharply into focus.

The film may appear saccharine to some, but its sweetness now feels like a necessary antidote to the poison pill of our current social norm. The Visitor is unnervingly prescient in its depiction of Tarek as an immigrant from Syria, but it’s also a rare movie about the Muslim immigrant experience in America. Our typical cinematic perspective instead has been colored by countless films from the 1980s onward, where most every dark-skinned man praises Allah before threatening to take the president hostage with a cartoon dynamite vest.

Those stereotypes, like Trump, unfortunately don’t live in the past. Search for movies that address what it’s like being Muslim in America and even Google will fail you. (Searching for movies that address the Muslim experience in America is like searching for W.M.D. in 2003 Iraq.) Beyond The Visitor, there’s AmericanEast—the Tony Shalhoub–starring drama about Middle Eastern figures in the post-9/11 orbit of a Los Angeles cafe; Fordson—the outstanding documentary about Muslim high-school football players in Michigan who face their main rivals during the Ramadan fast; and My Name Is Khan—the Bollywood melodrama about a man on a quest to tell the president that he’s simultaneously Muslim and not a terrorist (he ends up in jail). There may be a smattering of others, but every one of them exists in the cold bosom of the indie world, safely hidden from mainstream consumption. The resulting lack of portrayals of everyday Islam echoes our grand cultural ignorance about it; only 38 percent of Americans say that they know a Muslim personally.

At first, Walter is one of them, and his ignorance melts away as he gets to know his new roommates—just as studies typically illustrate. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. The caricature dissolves into character. Strip away Tarek’s and Zainab’s ethnicities and religions for a moment and they become merely a man and woman working to put food on their table and a roof over their heads. Remove the labels from Mouna and she becomes a protective mother worried about her son and confused about how to help him.

The most radical thing that The Visitor does is to treat its Muslim characters like people. It’s a long-form Humans of New York, and in refusing to treat his immigrant characters like graph lines, McCarthy gives us a glimpse of unfeeling bureaucracy behind detention and deportation. While showing far greater interest in people than in politics, he ends up challenging a popular political aggression without ever having to shout.

The ending is more bitter than sweet. As Tarek’s ordeal comes to an abrupt conclusion, we’re offered a civic slap to the face; Zainab’s hollow eyes as the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty appear. “Bring me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is a sucker punch reminder that if we choose it as our national ethos, we have to strain and work and sweat in order to persevere against cowards who leverage fear and misinformation for their own gain. The Visitor is a film that, among its rounded portrayals and percussive beats, displays how immigrants make America great, and how we fail them even on our good days.